Guide to IRC
﻿Guide to IRC This guide covers basic functionality. For things such as colors, file transfer, or DCC, consult your client documentation. If you just wish to connect to the DC IRC, the DC IRC sticky on the DC Forums should summarize the information you need as well as providing an easy link for IRC access. What is IRC? IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, which was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS (Bulletin Board System) called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which was operated on the BITNET. IRC has, as seen above, existed for many, many years (21 years from August 2009, actually) and has been its entire duration of existence. As of May 2009, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time, with hundreds of thousands of channels (the vast majority of which stand mostly vacant), operating on a total of roughly 1,500 servers worldwide 1. For specific information on DC's IRC, please see the IRC sticky found in the Site Discussion section of the DC Forum. DragCave's IRC TJ09 has set up an IRC specifically for DC. There is a basic guide to this IRC sticky'd in the Site Discussion section of the DC Forum. You can easily enter the IRC via this link: http://irc.technoized.com/?channel=dc If for any reason that link doesn't work, you may try this link: http://mibbit.com/chat/?channel=%23dc&server=irc.technoized.com And, if for any reason neither of the above links work, you can try this workaround as given by Fizzix, one of the network ops for the DC IRC: : You can use Mibbit directly at: http://mibbit.com/chat and entering "irc.technoized.com" in the "Server Address" box when you click "server" on the row reproduced below: IRC: dropdownbox Server | Auth | Charset You can then pick a username in the username field and put #dc in the channel box and hit "Go" If you are already IRC saavy and have your own client, the server you want to connect to is: irc.technoized.com and the channel you'll want for chatting is: #dc. Once there, you can see the rules and find other channels that may be of interest. Two other popular channels are #dctrades for teleport trading and #dragonlotto for lottoing off eggs and hatchlings. When joining, please pick a nickname of reasonable length and stick to it. If you end up using a few nicks, please use a client in which you can register your nicks. The DC IRC admin and owner is TJ09. The DC IRC ops are Fizzix (network op), Hellow (also a network op?), Starscream, and Thuban. The DC IRC hops are Shichibi, tridymite (aka tridy), kerrikens, Hellen (aka Sky), Annihilate (aka Anni) and simkim. (These are liable to change without notice on the wiki. The Moderating Team page on the DC Forum lists the DC ops if you need to contact them.) Before chatting in any channel, please aquaint yourself with the rules of the channel. The DC IRC is also PG-13 and English-only, just like the forum. Please don't spam your eggs or other adoptables in the main channels. Controversial topics, such as topics trenched in politics, are to be avoided in the main channels. Please be aware and sensitive of triggers others may have - warn if you must link to snakes, spiders, other insects, gore, etc. You are responsible for the content of what you link. If you have a problem with another user, it needs to be taken care of in PM. If you disagree with or don't understand a kick or ban you have received, please take it up with the op or hop in private via PM on the forum or IRC. Other rules can be read in the DC IRC sticky or in the DC IRC. IRC Clients There are literally hundreds of IRC clients, written for every platform and operating system imaginable. We will cover clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X Windows Clients There are several IRC clients for Windows, but the most popular is mIRC. Sadly, mIRC is a shareware program that requires registration after 30 days. It can be downloaded here: http://www.mirc.com/get.html . A free IRC client for Windows is Pidgin. It is a full fledged cross-protocol IM client with support for IRC. It is fully open sourced and cross platform, read more about it here: http://pidgin.im/ . Linux Linux has multitudes of IRC clients, all with different features. As mentioned above, Pidgin is a solution for a IRC client. Xchat is a dedicated GUI IRC client which is, in my opinion, a much better IRC client than Pidgin. You can learn more about it here: http://www.xchat.org/ . For terminal junkies, the top IRC client is irssi (http://irssi.org/). Then there is weechat (http://weechat.flashtux.org/), and epic4/epic5 (http://www.epicsol.org/), which is the most versatile and dynamic of them, but also harder to setup. Read their websites for more information. Mac OS X I am not sure which IRC client is the most popular, so I will just ramble on about them below. A very good IRC client for OS X (10.4 or greater, mind you) is Colloquy. It is compatible with both IRC, SILC, and ICB, making it a cross protocol client. It also has support for themes and plugins, plus it is completely free and open source software. You can read more about it here: http://colloquy.info/ . Another very good IRC client for Mac OS (7.0 or later) is Ircle. It is a shareware client with support for 10 networks (10 channels each), and it allows you to see/talk to other Ircle users (Quicktime and either/both a microphone and camera required) with its proprietary chat interface. More information here: http://www.ircle.com/ Out of these two, I suggest Colloquy over Ircle, due to it being completely free and open source, and due to me hearing very good things about it. Connecting to a server If you have not read your client's documentation yet, I suggest you do it now, for its advice may be better than mine for your client in specific. Launch your IRC client, and type “/server insertaserverhere” without quotes and replacing “insertaserverhere” with a real IRC server. For dragcave users, it would be irc.technoized.com to the channel #dc. Once connected, it will display the server's MOTD (message of the day). Then, congratulations, you just connected to a IRC server! Joining a channel To join a channel, type “/join #achannel”, also without quotes and replacing “#achannel” with a real IRC channel. To find a channel, type “/list”. Now, mind you, large IRC networks can have tens of thousands of IRC channels, potentially flooding you off the network. If you want to list channels on networks that large, I suggest referring to your client's documentation on a better way to list channels instead of using /list. When joining the DC IRC to chat, you should connect to #dc. Trading can be done at #dctrades. To participate in lotto'ing off eggs and hatchlings, see #dragonlotto. Clickspam is isolated to #clickspam. There are several other channels which you can find to participate in once you know the basics of IRC a little. Communicating To communicate, simply type into the text box and press enter/return. To type a action, precede your action with /me to make it show up as a action to the other users.To communicate directly with a user, use the /msg command. Other's call this a “PM”. To send a message, type /msg person messageyouaresending. Server Commands This is too big of a subject for me to write in this guide. It is suggested you read this table before proceeding with the guide. The rest of the document is irrelevant to this guide, and you can safely disregard it. Services Most networks run services on their servers for the users to use. Such services covered by this guide are NickServ, ChanServ, and MemoServ. NickServ NickServ is the service that controls your nickname and its usage. With NickServ, you can register a nickname and set a password to it so nobody else can use it (described in section 5.1.1, below). Other uses are setting up information on your nick, setting flags, etc. To contact NickServ, use /msg nickserv. For more nickserv commands, contact NickServ with the message “help” (done with /msg nickserv help). Registering a nickname Registering a nickname is very useful as it prevents others from taking that nickname unless they know your password (which they should not). To register your current nickname with NickServ, use “/msg nickserv register apassword yourmailaddress”, taking care to change “apassword” to the password you want and “yourmailaddress” to your email address. The password you choose should be secure and unguessable to other users, but not so secure that you yourself cannot remember it. Now, when you connect to the server, you will have to identify to NickServ with your password to keep it from changing your nick to something different after a amount of time. To do this, use “/msg nickserv identify yourpassword” still taking care to change “yourpassword” to your actual password. ChanServ ChanServ is the service that handles the channels of the network. It takes care of channel registration, channel flags, bans, etc. To get a more expansive look at ChanServ's commands, use “/msg chanserv help”. Effective Bans NOTE: This section assumes you have some experience with IP addresses. If not, contact a more experienced person (Myself or one of the #dc admins) with questions on this. A effective ban is one that bans the person's entire IP range. The way that is done is with a wildcard, which is the symbol *. Placed in the right locations, it can severely frustrate a person who is trying to evade your bans. Take this theoretical nickname!username@domainname: “lol!lol@99.43.71.63.dynamic.aisp.com”. To ban that person's entire ISP, the ban should look like: “*!*@*.dynamic.aisp.com”. Now, lets dissect that ban. The “*!*” part bans any of the possible nicknames and usernames (different from a nickname, mind you) that the person could use. The nickname wildcard was the first *, the username wildcard being the * after the ! (the ! is a separator for the nickname and username). The “*.dynamic.aisp.com” bans any of the potential IP addresses the person could use from their ISP. Now, banning a entire ISP may not be feasible in certain situations, like if you get a lot of visitors. The best option, in that case, is to contact the server administrators and have them deal with the person on the network level. This especially applies if the person is still evading your bans by using a tunnel or some sort of host spoofing application. Further reading on the topic of channel security is recommended. A good guide is http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/changuide.html#security . MemoServ MemoServ is a service used to send short memos to other registered users. When a user logs on, the person is informed of memos waiting for them to read. For more information on MemoServ, use “/msg memoserv help”. Modes Modes are certain “flags” you can set upon yourself to modify how you are seen to other users, how you see things, etc. They are described below. NOTE: These are all dragcave.net IRC server specific, these may not apply to other networks running different IRC server software. Nutter NOTE: Some of these require prior understanding of IRC to know what exactly they do. That is beyond the scope of this guide. Do not send me messages/emails asking me to describe what some of these are. I will just ignore it. If you want a possible more descriptive definition to what these are, use google or read this: http://webtoman.com/opera/panel/ircdmodes.html and look for the ones labled “Unreal” in the last column. User Modes These are in alphabetical order, and may be auto-set upon if you are identified, if you are a administrator, etc. +A Server Admin +a Services Admin +B Marks you as being a Bot +C Co-Admin +d Makes it so you can not receive channel messages +G Filters out all the bad words per configuration +g Can send & read globops and locops messages +H Hide IRCop Status (IRCop Only) +h Available for help (HelpOp) +i Invisible (not shown in /who) +N Network Administrator +O Local IRC Operator +o Global IRC Operator +p Hides the channels you are in from /whois +q Only U:Lines can kick you (Services Admins Only) +R Allows you to only receive PRIVMSGs/NOTICEs from registered (+r) users +r Identifies the nick as being registered +S Used to protect Services Daemons +s Can listen to server notices +T Prevents you from receiving CTCPs +t Says you are using a /vhost +V Marks you as a WebTV user (guide writer is not sure what this is) +v Receives infected DCC Send Rejection notices +W Lets you see when people do a /whois on you (IRCops Only) +w Can listen to wallop messages +x Gives user a hidden hostname +z Indicates that you are an SSL client Channel Modes These are in alphabetical order, and some are autoset by ChanServ upon channel registration: +A Only Administrators may join +a Makes the user a channel admin +b Bans the given user from the channel(This is a alternate way of banning a person, not to be confused with the way mentioned earlier in the guide.) +c No ANSI color can be sent to the channel +C No CTCP's allowed in the channel +e Exception ban – If someone matches this, they can join a channel even if they match an existing ban +f []:Channel flood protection. +G Makes channel G rated. Checks for words listed in the Badword Blocks, and replaces them with the words specified +h Gives half-op status to the user +i Invite required +I Invite exceptions ("invex") - if someone matches this, they can bypass +i requirements to enter the channel. +j Throttles joins per-user to joins per seconds seconds +K /knock is not allowed +k Sets a key needed to join +l <##>Sets max number of users +L If the amount set by +l has been reached, users will be sent to this channel +M A registered nickname (+r) is required to talk +m Moderated channel. Only +v/o/h users may speak +N No nick name changes permitted +n No messages from outside channels +O Only IRCops may join +o Gives a user channel operator status +p Makes channel private +q Sets channel owner +Q Only U:Lined servers can kick users +R Requires a registered nickname to join +S Strips all incoming colors +s Makes channel secret +T No NOTICE's allowed in the channel +u Auditorium – Makes /names and /who #channel only show channel ops +V /invite is not allowed +z Only clients on a Secure (SSL) Connection may join This is the end of the guide. Anything not mentioned here was left out for a reason. If you wish to find more information, unless otherwise stated, contact the creator of this guide or one of the chanops of #dc. The creator of this guide would prefer you use Google to find what you are looking for before you contact him, though. Sources 1 The majority of that section was taken from Wikipedia's article on IRC, which is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat License This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. The license, in human readable form, is located here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ . The license, complete with the legal mumbo jumbo, is located here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode . Category:The Forums Category:Browse